As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
Interpretation
Love, like a cough, is something that can't be hidden, no matter how small.
This quote by Anne Sexton suggests that love is an emotion that is inherently visible and cannot be fully suppressed or concealed, just as a simple cough will reveal itself despite attempts to hide it. It highlights the inevitable nature of genuine feelings, emphasizing that when it comes to love, even the smallest emotional expression will eventually surface.
In practice
Using this quote during a toast at a wedding to emphasize the importance of expressing love openly.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
Love is the Water of Life Everything other than love for the most beautiful God is agony of the spirit, though it be sugar- eating. What is agony of the spirit? To advance toward death without seizing hold of the Water of Life.
Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.
but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.
And suddenly all your troubles melt away, all your worries are gone, and it is for no reason other than the look in your partner's eyes. Yes, sometimes life and love really is that simple.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.